Guild Wars 2

What is the point of Toughness and Condition Damage?

Currently I see none, when I stack 2k of toughness, with Vitality, Condition, and Healing and am still getting 2 shot in fights. I got hit for 6k every single fight tonight that I was in. What is the point of weakness too? Even with targets weakened… why even put toughness in the game? I also see no point condition damage either when I can stack 7 conditions and see them all gone in 2 seconds.

On top of that, what is being done with the rampant amount of removal for conditions in the game right now? I have seen this both in my favor greatly, and in the favor of my enemies. As it is right now, I can stack regen, and healing over 5 ways on my build, and have 6 passive de-buffs with a specific de-buff of 7 different conditions + healing + regen. I see no point really of condition, both defensively and offensively. As my build is too right now, I can stack 7 different conditions in 1.5 seconds including 4 torment, and 10 bleeding, with 90 seconds of poison. Yet… someone can remove all of that in less than 5 seconds and heal all damage done. Difference, they use 1-2 skills… I use 4 and an elite.

On top of this issues of toughness, that I stated before, it seems to be rewarding 2 classes specifically… Warrior and Elementalist. I really do hate to say it that way, but they are the 2 who are rewarded the most from not having to build it. I have had an Elementalist clear 7 different conditions, heal 70% health, and turn around and crit me for 7k using Dragon’s Claw or Churning Earth—this was against my 2k toughness, vit, and healing build as well. Or why even build toughness when a Warrior comes in to stun lock you for 6 seconds, and hit you for over 18k in 1 combo of Hundred Blades (Screen below…)

*[ Yes, I did have only 15k health and 1.8k toughness with 2.9k armor at the time. Not godly at the time, but still pretty decent for having 110% crit and 45% crit chance still. For a thief that is pretty tanky as well. With 18k worth of damage getting through, and me not even denting 15% of his health on my combo, what is the point? ]

As the way it stands right now, this is an issue of a wild west shootout most of the fights in WvW… who can crit first?

With this “who crits first” issue, it is my strong opinion that toughness is not working… specifically in World vs. World. My main character has 400+ into vit, 2k toughness, 3.2k armor, 1.1k healing (and all of the listed removal/regen/healing above), and I still get dropped in 1-2 crit attacks by nearly every class but Necromancer and Ranger. Specifically I am getting hit by attacks for 5k, 6k, 7k each fight I have. The last time I ran into a condition build was a Necromancer over 2 days ago.

Power creep has happened, plain and simple… so the true question is ANet:

“How are you going to fix it?”
“How are you going to remove the seemingly endless amount of cleanse?”
“How are you going to truly make builds other than zerk worth it?”
“What is being done to reign in those ‘spikes’ of crits way outside of your normal damage output?” Yes, we have all seen this happen, both in our favor and against us.

Sure this was fine and dandy for the very minimal changes 3 weeks ago with the overhaul, but the creep is back. People just found ways to stack not only tanky zerk builds, but add removal too. Before you get holier than thou on me too, I have a critical hit build on both my warrior and thief, and yes, they are flat out too strong. It is pathetic that I can build 2 pieces of zerk on my PVT warrior and hit for 8k with my adrenaline skills. What is the point of diversity then? As I can see right now, there is no reward outside of PvE for diversity outside of zerk or crit. This shift is just swinging back to what it was before the patch. I have seen less and less condition builds every day now, and more and more zerk builds again.

Anyways, I do look forward to the honest and thoughtful comments and will address them accordingly. And yes, ANet, I truly hope you do see this—even with all the flak, kitten, and L2P comments I will surely get.

EDIT: Edited for spelling and verbage, as best as I could at least.

You have 16k health. You’re not tanky.

Toughness alone won’t make you tanky.

Vitality alone won’t make you tanky.

Toughness and Vitality together will make you tanky.

However, in the current iteration of the game, getting just one of the two will make you last 1 hit longer against a GC spec. If you get both, you’ll last 2-3 hits longer.

You’re playing a Thief. They have low health, low toughness and low overall survivability without the use of Stealth.

Nice. You only got hit for 6K. On builds without toughness I’ve been hit for 11K. That’s a 5K difference there.

Anyway, all of your complaints are meta specific. People are running a ton of condition cleanses because the recent buff to necromancers has made it so conditions were EVERYWHERE! There were literally dozens of complaints in separate threads that condition damage was too high, with people whining about how no matter how many cleanses they use, their conditions get reapplied instantly and they die just so fast from them. The rest of the more rational community has collectively said “learn to play” and they have: now players run a lot of condition cleanses, and that way they can beat the condition classes.

I also notice you play a thief. They are a distant #4 as far as condition classes go. Thieves can apply some poison and bleeds, with a few spots of weakness and torment, but that is about it. The best two condition classes (engineer and necromancer) work by applying so many conditions that opponents can’t cleanse them off. Blind, Chill, Poison, Bleed, Burn, Cripple, Weakness, Vulnerability, Confusion, Torment, all at the same time. This overwhelms player cleanses, letting them do steady damage despite people spamming cleanse.

Weakness itself is heavily RNG based. 50% chance to do 50% less damage means that some fights, it’ll never work. Other fights, it’ll cut down direct damage by half nearly the whole time. Using a necromancer in WvW myself with Weakening Shroud, I can confirm that Weakness has saved my rear multiple times, turning half the attacks my opponents dish out into feeble flailing.

But regardless, I will have to stress this greatly: Learn to play. The fact is that 100blades can only do a ton of damage if you just stand inside of those blades and take them to the face. If you dodge them, if you stun break out of their stun, if you counter-control them, if you keep your distance, if you pop in stealth, that whole 100 blades attack will miss. People figured this out a month after release.

The interesting thing is that power creep hasn’t leaked into the game. The top DPS from launch has been decreased greatly, with things such as the haste nerf, repeated damage nerfs, cooldowns on might and power building traits, and sometimes the flat out removal of the highest damaging techniques. The big difference here is that, as players have learned to play the game, they have become more comfortable running berserker gear, which does more damage. This means that while they do more damage themselves, they also take a lot of damage, and because of this it looks like power has crept into the game. The opposite is true, actually: for awhile the bunker meta was so strong in tPVP that Arenanet had to implement a counter-measure against boons to make it so you could even kill bunker Ele/Guard/Engi.

In all honesty, I can’t find much truth in your post. It all just looks like short-sighted QQ. Learn to play and increase your perception a bit, and maybe you’ll see things pay off. If someone makes a “tanky zerker”, pick apart what they’ve done to make it so a pure DPS build is durable, and learn from that.

There are issues with toughness for sure, but it not working is not one of them. I run a toughness build, and I take far less damage than most other players around me. I’ve been in pug’s and seen warriors get one-shotted, while the same damage took down only a fraction of my health on my necromancer.

What I dislike about toughness, is how it puts you high on the aggro table. You’d logically think DPS would be a bigger aggro magnet. But I run really high toughness, and get aggro all the time. In fact, aggro management in this game is rather un-transparent and hard to manage anyway.

As for condition damage, I still have issues with the 25 cap. It limits effectiveness of condition builds and favors direct DPS. The game on the whole favors DPS builds, that is no secret. And that is the real problem with the game at the moment.